Back when I started my endless ramblings about the transition from silent slapstick to screwball comedies, I led by singling out Harry Langdon’s Tramp, Tramp, Tramp as a fulcrum point where screwball becomes imperative. So it’s time to come back to Harry Langdon, and indulgently celebrate what made him so gloriously awesome, even if his style of comedy was unsustainable over the long run. Harry, this one’s for you.
Frank Capra once said that Charlie Chaplin had told him that the one comedian he felt intimidated by was Harry Langdon. You always have to be skeptical of hearsay, but it is an interesting thought.
1928—years after they parted company, and after Sennett had already distributed the last of his stockpiled Langdon back catalog, and long after he had anything left to gain or lose by association with the now-washed up star, Mack Sennett called Langdon a greater artist than Chaplin. And this from the man who had launched Chaplin’s career.
(Sennett was also the man who pushed Chaplin away by refusing to meet his salary demands. Sennett balked at paying Chaplin $3,000 a week—that was too rich for him, more than he thought Charlie was worth. Chaplin eventually signed with Mutual; for $10,000 a week. Then Sennett signed Langdon for $7,500 a week. That’s more than twice what Sennett refused to pay Chaplin, more than he ever paid anyone else.)
And whether or not Chaplin felt Langdon snapping at his heels, Harry definitely had a fan in Harold Lloyd, and later in Stan Laurel as well. This is the comedian other comedians came to see.
In 1925, Harry’s A-team was locked and loaded—writer Arthur Ripley and newcomer Frank Capra, director Harry Edwards, cinematographer William Williams, costars Vernon Dent and Natalie Kingston—he was well-paid at Sennett with his own virtually independent unit largely free from Sennett’s notorious interference. Immediately after wrapping this shoot, he and Team Langdon would embark on his first feature film. Things were comin’ up Langdon!
Subtlety was the name of Langdon’s game. In an interview, Langdon talked about the lessons he learned during his long years—decades—on the vaudeville stage. He said:
“One valuable little thing I learned in vaudeville is that you can pretty well control the laughter of your crowd. If things were going well, I’d play along at a fairly slow tempo and keep my voice well down. If the laughs were too few and quiet, I’d increase my speed and raise my voice.”
OK, now the general thinking when it comes to the difference between stage acting and screen acting is that on the stage you have to make everything broader and louder and more expansive so it “reads” to spectators in the back of the theater. When Langdon was on top of his game and everything was clicking, he could turn it all down to the lowest possible setting—he only had to speed up or talk loud when something was wrong in his relationship with the audience. This was how he performed on the vaudeville stage, the lowest, broadest, crudest form of theatrical entertainment. Take that aesthetic to the movies, where the camera demands a smaller, more intimate performance, and his style of comedy was dialed down to a whisper.
Langdon boasted privately of how much pride he took in being able to drag out a gag longer than anyone else.
Reading through the screenplays of his early short films reveals that plainly. Most of the big comedians of that era worked with almost no script—they’d show up with little more than a bare-bones premise and ad-lib the rest. Charlie at a health spa. Buster works at a garage. Lloyd at an amusement park. Now, go!
That didn’t work so well with Langdon. His world of comedy was a palette of vacant stares and running in circles that only had significance when in some other context—he needed something to play against.
Dogs, skunks, monkeys, herds of sheep, exploding cows… and mannequins, wax statues, empty suits of armor, telephone poles, glasses of beer, invisible insects—anything inhuman or inanimate he can inexplicably treat as sentient.
To help illustrate what I mean, consider a short film Chaplin did for the US government to promote Liberty Bonds for the war effort in WWI. The thing’s like 10 minutes long and Charlie does it against a black backdrop with only the most abstracted props. His mastery of expressive mime was such that he could make a film that consisted of Charlie and almost nothing else, and have it be meaningful, even funny. Put Langdon in an empty room by himself and you’ve got nothing.
I don’t mean that as a criticism of Harry Langdon, just a descriptive statement of fact. Because, if you give Langdon the right context, his bizarre world of inappropriate reactions becomes sublime.
Here’s another Langdon quote:
“There should be a breathing space between laughs, with a gradual development leading up to a laugh. A picture that is one laugh from start to finish becomes tedious. Relief is necessary.”
That’s a bold statement, and it could so easily have been said by Chaplin. You had so many of the silent comedians of the age desperately mugging—look at me! Look at me!!—especially so at speed-addicted Sennett, that Langdon’s steadfast stubborn insistence on the low-key and subtle is remarkable.
You can see the echoes of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd in the films of Jackie Chan and Jet Li, but Langdon—you see his legacy in the likes of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, Ricky Gervais, the Kids in the Hall—comedians who confidently disregard the conventional rules, deliberately make the audience uncomfortable, and revel in the performance of things not readily identifiable as jokes.
It was a truly unprecedented approach to screen comedy. Not only was he disregarding the usual standard-issue Sennett formula of violence and mayhem, he was flying in the face of every other silent comedian as well.
For one thing, in an era of big physical comedy dominated by outrageous stuntwork, Langdon relied on stunt doubles. For those of us fans of Keaton and Lloyd that feels a bit like cheating, but c’mon folks, Harry was a 40 year old man when he started making films. And who says you have to be an acrobat to be a comedian?
He did have some athletic ability, finely honed on the vaudeville stage. His earliest act was a thing called the leaning act. He’d plunk his feet on the stage, fixed in place, and then lean insanely far to one side so that by all rights he should have fallen flat on his face, only to snap back to position like a rubber band.
In her extraordinary study of Langdon’s comic style, film scholar Joyce Rheuban cites Sigmund Freund’s definition of humor. Seems Dr. Freud says comedy is when someone expends an inordinate amount of energy on physical functions but not enough on mental functions. Now, what Freud’s supposed to know from funny is beyond me, but man, did he nail it with Langdon or what?